I’ve been thinking through how to leave Facebook’s Instagram service since June, when I finally deleted my central Facebook account. This should be easy, because I don’t post that much on Instagram, but it always seems hard because it’s the best user experience (IMO) on mobile for writing a quick blog post attached to one or more photos.
Today I was poking around on my Mastodon account for the first time in a long while and noticed Remkus had mentioned something called Pixelfed as an Instagram alternative. Pixelfed is an open source project and self-describes as: “an image sharing platform, an ethical alternative to centralized platforms.”
Those are words I generally like.
This is a relief because I’ve come really close to deciding on something completely different with a new domain (casualgram.com 🙈) that generated email newsletters with images rather than an Instagram-ish interface. Now I can use that domain for my own instance of Pixelfed or something else entirely.
It’s a little silly to jump ship so quickly onto a platform that’s still being developed, but my actual emotional connection to Instagram has dwindled to almost zero (even though I really like posting photos) and I’m ready to go for it. If nothing else, this could be an interesting platform to use as a place to post photos that are then ingested into this site—especially if a nice mobile app appears, though the current PWA is showing promise and an app may not matter.
Maybe this is the PWA based solution for fishtacos.blog that Felix mentioned… 🙂
Ok, so my approach to actually leaving:
- Join Pixelfed. ✅
- Post a note to Instagram with some message like “link in the bio because Instagram doesn’t trust the open web“. ✅
- Request Instagram archive. ✅
- Delete Instagram account. ✅
- Find the right way to import my Instagram content into this site.
I’m at pixelfed.social/jeremyfelt if you end up joining. 👋🏻
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